I don't understand. Your code is fine, as long as you don't forget the *rum = *run line before the start of it. I don't get what this 'strict' thing is that you're talking about; that'll just make it complain about global symbols or something.

This does point out, however, that the case-insensitivity of filesystems that everybody agrees is the right thing now that Microsoft has proven it correct, doesn't go far enough. If Perl really DWIM, then it wouldn't require the *rum = *run line; it would know that 'n' and 'm' really shouldn't be distinguished anyway. These are variables, people, not taxonomic identifiers or proper nouns -- why do we need base 63 ([a-zA-Z0-9_]) to distinguish them when the typical program has barely a dozen active at the same time?